Day 30: A Full English breakfast powers us to Ironbridge

Distance: 11.6 miles
Today: Sunny
Tuesday forecast: Sunny
Wednesday forecast: Sunny
Thursday forecast: Sunny
Friday forecast: Partly Cloudy (!)
We've had more weather related problems today. Today Dawn has come down with both watch tan and farmer tan! We're not sure there is much to be done; the next three days are all calling for sunshine and eighteen degrees, just like we've had the past three days. Looking out ten days, the worst is Saturday, with a 30% chance of rain. All the rest is sunny or partly cloudy. Hey, all you people back in snowy, cold Corvallis: you should have come out here and joined us!
Our morning routine has become pretty settled in now. We're generally up before 6:30, but we have a phone alarm set so that we can't sleep later than that - except on rest days. We slowly get up, walk around on stiff legs like zombies for a while, check for email and blog comments, and get our packs together. We head downstairs for breakfast at 7:30. The modern English breakfast experience starts with a selection of yogurts, cereals, fruits. Sometimes these are in packaged containers, but the nicer places, like our place this morning, has it laid out like this.




I set myself up with grapefruit juice, and a big bowl of yogurt covered by heaps of either granola or muesli. Dawn eats yogurt, wheatabix, and fresh fruit. Our hosts usually pop in right about now, and ask us if we'd like coffee or tea, and what sort of cooked breakfast we'd like. The hosts range from very matter of fact order takers, to quite formal, to chatty and informal. Our hosts this morning, Allison and Jonathan, were the latter, in the very best possible way.




We need coffee in the morning. It pretty much always arrives in a French press, except for the real restaurants (like our London hotel) which serve espresso. But the French press does not guarantee good coffee! The best coffee we've had was in Cornwall, and it's pretty much gone downhill since then. For reasons I don't understand, I drink several cups of coffee even if it's bad, and the bad coffee does not sit well two hours of walking later. But maybe the downhill trend has stopped, because this morning's coffee was great - I can hope!




The modern English breakfast is a two phase deal: after the cereal comes a cooked breakfast. It's like two breakfasts in one - I love this country! Everyone will do simple standards or a Full English, and sometimes they have specialities of the house, like pancakes or omelets. Dawn has gotten into the habit of ordering a standard: scrambled eggs on brown toast. I nearly always go for the Full English. The typical Full English comes with an egg, sausage, bacon, fried tomato, fried mushroom, toast, and, on a good day, baked beans. Every place has their own little variations. If the host seems nice, I'll ask politely if I might have two eggs, and I try and get them poached, in an effort to be heart healthy. Here's how it looked this morning.




The big black disk is Allison's replacement of the normal fried button mushrooms: a thick grilled portabello. A very nice surprise! The brown circles are Shrewsbury biscuits, kid of like scones, which is her upgrade to simple toast. Most places fry everything, but Allison does everything on the grill. This is pretty much top of the line breakfast in my book. To contrast, we had breakfast at a greasy spoon sort of diner yesterday morning. The tomatoes were cheap canned romas, the mushrooms were out of a can, the sausage was fatty and greasy, and everything was fried. Oh, and the coffee was swill.




The bacon they serve in England is nothing like the bacon at home. It's what we'd call back bacon - and instead of strips, they come in rashers. It's not smoked the way ours is; tastes more like normal ham than how I think of bacon. Dawn really misses the nice crisp smokiness of home. I like both; the thick heartiness of a rasher really hits the spot first thing in the morning.
Some places also serve hog's pudding (southwest country) or black pudding (more northern England). These are sausages made from bits of animals that normal people would never consider eating, except maybe on a dare. The main ingredient in black pudding is boiled blood. The texture is weirdly gritty. Bits get stuck between your teeth. It's just terrible. Hog's pudding is not quite as bad, but still, my advice is to just say "no". See if you can spot the black pudding in this breakfast from the Zetter, our London hotel (the first and last time I ordered it).




At the Endsliegh, back in Devon, the waitress was very sweet and convinced me to try some Hogs pudding. "It's so good", she cooed. It wasn't.




Although I usually go for the Full English, I'm not closed minded. In Cornwall, I made the very wise choice to try their local smoked Haddock with a poached egg on toast. The best was in Penzance, prepared by Simon and Susan at Camilla house, but I didn't take a picture before eating it. I had the same kind of thing a few days later at Penarwyn House, which was also quite good.




We're here in March, not exactly holiday time, and we like to eat early, so often we are the only ones eating. But sometimes there will be more people in the dining room. This morning we were lucky enough to be joined by another couple, here from northwest England on holiday. Friendly, nice folks, with challenging accents. I wonder if people with strong accents have as much trouble understanding me? Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of them, so here's another one of our table, this time including Dawn's scrambled egg on toast.




After breakfast, we change from our breakfasting clothes into our hiking clothes, exchange shoes for boots, finalize the packs, pay the bills, and out we go. Usually we're walking by a quarter till nine, sometimes earlier, but today it was more like half past nine before we were underway. We were having such a nice time at Churchdown House that we lingered as long we could, and besides, today was a short day: not even twelve miles.




Once you get up north of Stourport-on-Severn, the river is no longer navigable to cruisers and barges. No more locks, and a lot more current. It's still mostly a wide, slow river, but here and there you see some riffles, and even small rapids. As we were walking, I was thinking how this was a river more my Dad's style, where you could put on waders, carry a fly pole out into the water, and maybe luck into some trout. Sure enough, around the bend, here's what we see.




Farther south, the fishing scene is a lot different. The river is lined with platforms on both sides, like little docks, sometimes just a few dozen yards apart, with numbers posted at the top so you know which sits which.




We didn't see anyone fishing off of these platforms, but I know how it would go. There'd be a guy with a tweed sports coat and cap, holding a spinning pole and behind him would be his valet, weighed down with bags of gear and an empty creel. "I say Thomas, be a good chap and bait my hook". "Yes, milord. Would you like one worm or two milord?". This is repeated every twenty yards down the river.
I mentioned yesterday how churches dot the landscape here. Even more common than churches are manors. There's a great range from relatively modest Victorian mansions, to enormous over the top places. Today we spotted a beauty across the river.




It's called Apley Hall, and was built by remodeling a more modest Georgian house in 1810. It was a grand house in the nineteenth century, with a big staff of servants, format dinners, balls. But times changed, and in the sixties it was repurposed for a few decades as a boarding school, and after the school closed in 1987 it sat completely empty, deteriorating, for ten years. Since then it's been repurchased and renovated, and it seems they are turning the grand house into flats.




After a pot of tea at a riverbank pub, we soon arrived at Ironbridge. They say this place is where the industrial revolution kicked off, and they might be right. It's really interesting stuff, and I'd love to write about it, but this post is already too long. And besides, I've got to get to bed - I need to get up in eight hours and have my Full English Breakfast! But first, here's a picture of Dawn with A giant teddy bear.




Tomorrow we are walking through the Shropshire countryside to the market town of Shrewsbury. I learned from my sister in law Lianne that there's a series of books about a guy from there named Brother Cadbury. I think he invented the process for getting creamy nougat into those little chocolate squares - genius!

Location:Woodside,Telford,United Kingdom